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To Paypal or NOT to Paypal…

Quite unbelievably, despite reporting a problem to Paypal on 26 August, we have STILL not received confirmation that this problem has been resolved. Here’s the background…

On 26 August we identified a serious problem with Paypal.

StatCounter members who had upgraded in the previous few days had NOT been appropriately upgraded as the Paypal system stopped sending out subscription payment notifications. In fact new subscriptions were no longer created at all and payments received were not linked to StatCounter accounts.

In short, we were receiving hundreds of Paypal payments which we couldn’t link to any StatCounter account. As you can imagine, this caused serious difficulties for us.

We reported the problem to Paypal with as much supporting evidence as possible to assist them in quickly identifying the problem… but, as we have come to expect, the first response from Paypal completely ignored the information we supplied and denied the problem.

It’s now 5 WEEKS since we reported this issue to Paypal and we have STILL not received confirmation that this problem has been resolved. We feel we have been more than patient at this stage and remain astounded that any company can treat its customers with such disregard.

While we understand that ALL services can have problems from time to time we find Paypal’s habit of ignoring its customers to be abhorrent. We are particularly upset that Paypal’s poor behaviour can and does impact on you, our members, and also unfairly reflects on us.

Our Position
As a result of this Paypal problem, we had to manually examine hundreds of payments, attempt to link these to StatCounter accounts and where this wasn’t possible we had to contact the payees individually to request their StatCounter usernames. As you can imagine, this had a high cost for us in terms of time and resources. Further, although these problems were caused by Paypal, StatCounter has absorbed all the costs of this problem. We also felt it was only right for us to offer all affected members a free upgrade for one month to make amends for the problems. Paypal, of course, offered us (their customer) absolutely nothing by way of assistance for the trouble they caused us.

Unfortunately, we have been here before… At that time, we decided NOT to remove Paypal as a payment option for new subscribers. This was because we highly value each of our members and, despite OUR poor opinion of Paypal, we have to cater to what YOU, our members want. However, we are now again considering our position in relation to Paypal…

Your Feedback Please
Due to the problems outlined above, Paypal has been suspended as a payment option (for NEW subscriptions) on StatCounter since 26 August and remains so. We can’t possibly reactivate it until such time as Paypal confirms that the problems introduced in August have been fixed… but we have no idea when that will be. In the meantime, we’d like to ask you, our members, for your thoughts on this.

Both problems we have had with PayPal have been with their subscription payments. During this problem and the last one, regular Paypal manual payments appeared to be functioning normally. On this basis, we are wondering if we should STOP accepting PayPal subscriptions and accept only manual payments instead? Manual payments *would* require our upgraded customers to log in to Paypal every time a payment falls due… so perhaps we will have to restrict Paypal upgrades to quarterly or yearly – logging in every month to pay could be a bit too time consuming! We’re not sure about this idea, so do let us know your thoughts!

We’d also love to know what alternative payment options we can introduce to cater for your payment preferences.

Here are our initial thoughts…

We need to accept Discover cards – if you can recommend an acquirer for a European company, please let us know

We need to accept AMEX for USD payments – currently we can only accept AMEX directly for EUR payments

We need to accept echecks – please let us know if you can recommend any echeck processors

537 comments on “To Paypal or NOT to Paypal…”

I find paypal completely worthless I recently moved to a new location and changed my paypal address to that address and they closed my account and are holding my money for 6 months because someone else at that address had issues with their account. Their customer service sucks and will not work with you at all. Their answer to me was too bad call in six months to maybe get your money. I’ll never use them again no matter who wants to pay via paypal.

I’m willing to use my Visa account if that’s what you prefer. Just let me know. Just for the record though, I’ve never had any problems with PayPal. Of course that doesn’t mean anything, seeing as how I am a person of no importance . . .

I have had several problems with PayPal over the years, and am having one now. Suddenly, automatic payments with shopping carts stop working. I also think they’re falling behind in terms of interface.

There is a brand new processor in BETA. No money can be deposited into or taken out of it while they’re in testing phases. But they give you $50 in credit for signing up, and more for staying involved with their testing process. (Can’t guarantee if that means $50 USD once they connect with bank accounts, etc., but that’s the implication.)

This processor has a much nicer interface and seems to be promising more and better features, possibly rolled out by the end of next week.

If they continue with this nice a platform and beat out others on features and compete nicely with rates, this will be one to know about. PLUS … for people trying it out now and getting funds into their account for free, they may be able to upgrade with you for nothing out of their own pocket for a time. This way they can experience the benefits of an upgraded account.

I’m not calling this an immediately solution. But it’s one that looks like it has a LOT of promise, and I’d encourage you to check it out and stay aware of their developments.

Sorry to hear you’re having issues with PayPal, being a long time StatCounter user I know you’ve been a long time PayPal customer because that’s how I’ve always paid. I would continue to like to pay the way I prefer, PayPal, I hope you can find a way to resolve the issue.

In case you haven’t contacted their technical support team (I know the CS lines can be annoying) you should make sure to file a ticket here: http://www.paypal.com/mts

I am a bit surprised that I received the e-mail pointing to this post since we have not been a StatCounter subscriber for a year or two.

We stopped our subscription with StatCounter for a similar reason being quoted for the PayPal “problem”. That reason was the StatCounter support folks were not listening to us and not responding to a series of problems we were having with reports generation. The problems did not get fixed, no one listened, so we cancelled.

As far as PayPal is concerned, it is doubtful that the problem is on their end. Sites like eBay and other third party sites that act as payment proxies for software vendors are processing transactions today without a hitch.

You received an email as both your StatCounter accounts remain open and you previously had a Paypal upgrade with us – we explained this in the email.

Unfortunately you appear to have only posted your support request re report generation in the user forum – you did not send it to our Support Desk – had you done so we would have been more than happy to assist you. With millions of member using our service, we’re afraid it’s simply not possible for a member of the Support Team to reply to every forum thread – although we certainly do our best. So we’re terribly sorry you feel we were not listening… but the truth is we can’t listen if you don’t speak to us!

We note only one ticket from you to our Support Desk and this concerned cancellation and was dealt with swiftly and efficiently. Here’s what happened…

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
3rd April 2009 14:56:17

I had intended to cancel my subscription via PayPal on the seventh as that was day before the payment was indicated as coming out.
The payment came out today.
Please reverse it as I do no intend to use the log count anymore.
PayPal details:
Subscription Payment Sent (Unique Transaction ID #XXX)
In reference to: S-XXX
Please make it so.

Philip Elder

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
4th April 2009 20:44:58

Hello,

Please do not leave me hanging.

I have had problems getting certain portions of the site for a while now. The Forums were of no assistance blaming our ISP when we encountered the problem on any ISP we tried from.

We respectfully request a refund.

Please respond in kind as I will have no choice but to put in a payment refusal request with PayPal if I don’t hear back.

Thank you,

Philip

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

6th April 2009 05:43:09

re: Billing
Philip, Hi!

Apologies for the delay due to weekend.

As per your request your account has been downgraded, amount refunded and recurring billing stopped.

Do let us know, if you need any further assistance.

Sincerely

Tarak
StatCounter Team

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You contacted us on a Saturday and we responded with the refund and cancellation as requested on Monday… please do let us know how better we could have assisted you?

Also – you can close your StatCounter accounts using this link if you wish.

While on paper and in hindsight things look so, at the time the answer was “it’s your ISP, there is nothing we can do” was what came back.

The not listening part came in when it was mentioned to support that we had tried to run the reports from _all available_ ISP based Internet access (through clients of ours) and we still received the same results but received the same reply from support.

At some point we need to weight the cost in time when trying to deal with something that is not doing what we expect it to do. That is where we ended up. We could no longer afford the time trying to get our problem resolved so we moved onto another service … which has been flawless since the start.

The PayPal may become Ignorent because of the they are having Largest Customer Base for the Online Secure Payment option. I am totally agreed with you for not accepting the payment option as PayPal, but I can not ignore the payment option as PayPal because of the non availability of other online payment option in some country, so I am accepting the PayPal payment, now when I have to spent that money for availing services and make the online payment, obiously I prefere to make payment from my PayPal Murchent account and the Chain go on.
Thats why, we cannot ignore the PayPal, however they can Ignore us!!!
Google Checkout is still not available in all the corners (as far as i know)